Latest / The History of Belgium: A Small Country with a Giant Colonial Legacy — Fexingo History / The 1893 Luluabourg Fort: Belgium's Kasai Outpost and the Tetela War
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about the Force Publique mutinies — Luluabourg in 1895, Boma in 1901 — but I realised we never actually sat down and talked about the fort itself. The reason there was a garrison at Luluabourg in the first place. Luna: Wait, Luluabourg was a fort? I always thought it was just a town. Lucas: It started as one. In 1893, the Congo Free State was pushing inland from the Congo River basin into the Kasai region — that's central-southern Congo, rich in rubber and, later, diamonds. The Belgians needed a strongpoint to control the local trade routes and keep an eye on the Luba and Songye kingdoms. So they built a fort at a village called Luluabourg, on the Lulua River. Lucas: The area was mostly Luba and Songye people, with some Tetela further north. The Luba had a powerful kingdom that went back to the 16th century, with a complex court structure and a thriving trade in copper and salt. But by the 1890s, the kingdom was already weakened by internal succession disputes and Arab-Swahili slave raiders from the east. The Belgians saw an opening. Lucas: The fort itself was a standard colonial post — mud-brick walls, a few cannons, a parade ground, barracks for maybe a hundred African soldiers under a handful of European officers. But its real purpose was economic. The Compagnie du Kasai had been granted a huge concession to extract rubber, and Luluabourg was the collection point. Every village within a day's march had to bring in a quota of rubber or face the chicotte. Luna: The chicotte — that hippo-hide whip. We've heard about that in so many episodes. Lucas: Exactly. The chicotte was the daily reality for most Congolese under Free State rule. But at Luluabourg, the brutality sparked something bigger. In 1895, a group of Tetela soldiers in the Force Publique — many of them former slaves who'd been conscripted — decided they'd had enough. Their leader was a man named Mulumba Nsanda. Lucas: Mulumba Nsanda was a Tetela from the Sankuru region. He'd been captured by Arab slavers as a child, then liberated by the Force Publique and forced into their ranks. That was a common story — the Free State's army was built on freed slaves, or 'libérés', who had no way home. Mulumba rose through the ranks to become a sergeant, and he was stationed at Luluabourg when the rubber quotas got unbearable. Lucas: In February 1895, he and a few other Tetela sergeants planned a mutiny. They killed the European officers in their sleep — Commandant Henry, who was the post commander, and two other Belgians. Then they took control of the fort's arsenal and called on nearby villages to join them. Within days, they had maybe 2,000 men, women, and children following them into the bush. Luna: So they didn't hold the fort. They just grabbed what they could and ran. Lucas: Right. They knew they couldn't hold a fixed position against Belgian reinforcements. Instead, they used guerrilla tactics — ambushing supply columns, raiding rubber stations, and melting into the forest. The Belgians were furious. They sent a punitive column under Captain Lothaire, a notoriously brutal officer, with Maxim guns and a battalion of Hausa mercenaries from West Africa. Lucas: The Tetela War, as it's sometimes called, lasted about a year. Lothaire's men burned villages, killed anyone suspected of harboring rebels, and took hundreds of prisoners. Mulumba Nsanda was eventually captured in 1896 and executed by firing squad. But the rebellion didn't end there — other Tetela groups kept fighting into 1897. Luna: And what happened to the fort? Did they rebuild it? Lucas: Yes, the Belgians repaired and expanded Luluabourg after the mutiny. It became a major administrative center for the Kasai province, and later a prison — we covered the 1931 Luluabourg prison break in a previous episode. But the irony is that the fort never really suppressed resistance. It just concentrated it. The Tetela who survived the war were scattered across the Congo as forced laborers on railways and plantations, and their descendants still remember the rebellion as a moment of pride. Lucas: And that's exactly why we do these deep dives. If this episode helped you understand a piece of history you hadn't known before, that's the point — and the reason we keep this show ad-free is that listeners who find it useful choose to support it. If that's you, you can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Yeah, it's a small way to keep these conversations going without any commercial breaks. So, back to the Tetela — what was the long-term impact of that war? Lucas: Well, the Tetela War convinced the Free State that they needed a stronger military presence in Kasai. They built more forts, increased the size of the Force Publique, and intensified rubber extraction. But it also created a deep-seated resentment among the Tetela and neighboring groups that would resurface during the Congo's independence movement. Many Tetela later joined Patrice Lumumba's MNC party in the 1950s. Lucas: And the fort itself? Luluabourg eventually became the city of Kananga — the capital of Kasai-Central province. The old fort walls are gone, but the street layout still follows the colonial grid. If you walk through the central market today, you're standing on ground that was soaked in blood in 1895. Luna: That's heavy. I want to know more about the Tetela language and culture — did they have a written tradition? Lucas: The Tetela language, Otetela, is a Bantu language with an oral tradition — proverbs, epic poems, and genealogies passed down through generations. They didn't have a writing system until Christian missionaries developed one in the early 20th century. But their oral history preserves the names of leaders like Mulumba Nsanda and the details of the 1895 rebellion. Some of those stories were collected by Belgian ethnographers in the 1930s. Lucas: There's also a fascinating cultural detail: the Tetela have a tradition of 'lukunga' — a kind of mock battle dance that reenacts historical conflicts. Even today, at festivals in the Sankuru region, you can see young men performing the movements of the Force Publique mutiny, with the Maxim gun represented by a wooden prop. Luna: So the rebellion is still alive in their memory. That's incredible. Lucas: Exactly. And that's what colonial history often misses — the voices of the people who lived through it. The Tetela didn't just disappear after 1895. They adapted, resisted, and kept their identity. When you visit the Sankuru today, you hear Tetela spoken, you see the lukunga dances, and you know that a fort at Luluabourg couldn't erase them. Luna: So the fort is gone, but the story isn't. Lucas: Right. And that's the thread we'll keep pulling in future episodes — the human stories behind the colonial infrastructure. Next time, I want to look at a different kind of fort: the one at Boma, the Free State's capital, and how it became a symbol of both oppression and resistance.